FBI Director James Comey just cannot win! Yesterday, Kemberlee blogged that the Department of Justice will review his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Today, House Democrats are angry after a confidential briefing over allegations that Russia “hacked” the DNC and Hillary campaign chair John Podesta to sway the election towards President-elect Donald Trump. Those briefed believe Comey is “unfit to lead the agency.”

“I was non-judgmental until the last 15 minutes. I no longer have that confidence in him,” Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), ranking member of the Veterans Affairs Committee, said as he left the meeting in the Capitol.

“Some of the things that were revealed in this classified briefing — my confidence has been shook.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), senior Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, delivered a similar condemnation.

“I’m extremely concerned — extremely,” he said.

“I’ll just — I’m very angry,” echoed Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.).

Despite this, though, one anonymous Democrat told The Hill that some in the party prefer to keep Comey in charge instead of taking a chance with a Trump replacement:

“Do I have confidence in him? Not really. But I think he’s probably going to be better than the guy they’d put in,” said one Democrat, who spoke only anonymously to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s like a rock and a hard place, but I think that’s pretty much where a lot of people are.”

Republicans left the briefing with a different tone from the Democrats:

“The FBI director is a good man who was placed in a very difficult position,” said Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.). “His boss [U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch] made life very difficult for him in the last year when she met with Bill Clinton on the tarmac.”

Last week, the intelligence community declassified a report that supposedly showed evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin concocted a campaign to influence our election to favor Trump. The evidence shown to the public has a ton of dots, but nothing directly linking Putin. Plus, someone PHISHED the DNC and Podesta, making it harder to track the perpetrator.

It’s hard to take Democrats seriously since they continue to feign outrage since November 8, blaming Hillary’s loss on everyone and everything EXCEPT HILLARY.

Comments

It is time for Comey to go. Rightly or wrongly, he has become the subject of too much controversy. He should step down and someone of unimpeachable integrity and with bipartisan approval should take his place. The FBI should be apolitical in both reality and perception.

Comey should go because Hillary should have been indicted. Many in DC should go as well since they are incompetent. The DNC is a private club and should have been protected from hacking but again, DNC employees are to incompetent for that. This administration shouldn’t be punishing anyone for hacking the DNC. Where was all the outrage when veterans’ and gov employee info got hacked by foreign govs? Had Hillary won, there would be no conversations about any hacking.

Sorry myiq2xu. I hate to burst your balloon, but there is NO ONE with bipartisan support. Thanks to Øbama, our country is rent, and it will be YEARS until we see any semblance of bipartisanship again (see Alinsky’s rules).

That’s where we’ve gotten to. Comey—a decent guy, I think, but spineless—was between a rock and a hard place: damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.

But … he’s supposed to be smarter than the average bear, yet HE’S the one that let himself get in this position in the first place. If he didn’t push for an indictment of HRC, then he should have. If he did push and got denied, then he should have resigned … and done so very publicly.

I don’t have any sympathy for him whatsoever. He talks a good game, but he is unprincipled. He said the FBI are not weasels. Sorry, dude, but yes they are. They screw the pooch all the time, and get away with it. Don’t believe me? Use your favorite search engine and look up “Ibragim Todashev.”

So, the meme is still – somehow – that the Russians were allowed into a single eMail account by a doofus. Once in that single account, they released a few eMails that were truthful and showed an accurate picture of how the DNC and the press collaborate large and small to mislead the voting public.

That did all these things long before Donald Trump was viewed as a plausible Presidential candidate by any rational and/or reasonable person, before he had won any significant number of Electoral College votes, and before he really even began to run a semi-serious campaign…AND they did all of their ‘manipulating’ without moving the needle of the ever-present and always-ongoing polling that was constantly being shoved in our faces!

BUT…

It was all done to ensure his election to the White House without manipulating a single vote of a member of the voting public.

Screw knowing how the Russians “hacked the election”. I want to know more about their time-travel machine that allowed them to jump forward in time so as to know that the election might could be manipulated in his favor by even the remotest possibility!

In fact, if we can confirm the intelligence report’s conclusion that Putin intervened with the goal of electing Trump, there must be a new election in the United States.

This sounds extraordinary, and of course it is. But it can be done, and indeed must be done in order to uphold the fundamental democratic principle of free and fair elections, a principle undermined by the Russian efforts.
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How would this take place? The first step should be to conduct further investigations aimed at determining whether the intelligence agencies’ conclusions are correct. It is dangerous for Trump to suggest, without a shred of evidence, that the intelligence report is wrong. But it would also be a mistake to accept the intelligence report without asking questions and getting more information.
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If it is determined that Russian efforts did indeed put Trump over the top in an incredibly close election, then the next step would be to pass a constitutional amendment requiring a one-time special election to be held as soon as possible.

Chris Edelson is an assistant professor of government in American University’s School of Public Affairs.

Note the admission that this would take a constitutional amendment, which means 2/3 of each house and 38 state legislatures would have to agree to it. all I can say to this Edelson person is if you really think that’s a fruitful path to pursue, be my guest. Try your hardest. I’ll even say that if by some miracle you actually succeed in persuading all those Republican legislators to call a new election, then I will support it, because that will have been clearly shown to be the overwhelming public will. But until then, shut up.

Who’s to say the Russians wouldn’t “hack” the new election or the amendment process itself? Would we ever be sure? As long as your password is “passw0rd” and your brother is the chief US lobbyist for Sperbank (Putin’s favorite savings bank) and you will be Hillary’s chief of staff, no; we never will be.

Post-briefing remarks by one of the Democrats were that Debbie Wasserman-Test had a meltdown during the briefing and asserted that nobody at the FBI had told her a thing about the Russian hack. Everything I had read prior to yesterday was that the FBI had contacted the DNC after they discovered the Russian’s had hacked the DNC network and were told that the DNC’s contractor was handling it.

Obviously the Demorats are upset but nobody seems to want to leak anything (yet), they just want to shoot the messenger (Comey). Obviously there’s more to the story.

Let’s see, this idiot professor wants an Amendment to allow for a special election: First 3/4 of Congress must agree and then 3/4 of all the state must agree as well. Just how long does he think THAT would take. Sounds more like he just wants to give Obama a third term.